In the textile industry, it is very challenging to mass produce batch-sample fabrics that meet customer's requirements based on images of a standard sample or computer-aided design (CAD) images. Major difficulties include accurately assessing the color and/or shape of an image for a batch sample with respective to an image for a standard sample or an image for a CAD design.
At present, a large portion of traditional textile industry are still relying on manual assessment using an image of a batch sample and an image of a standard sample or a CAD image to determine whether a batch sample meets the standards for mass production. The manual assessment requires experienced operators, imposing high cost for quality control in the textile industry. Even with experienced operators, the assessment is still subject to large variations when assessing at different times, conditions, and with different operators. This would lead to inconsistency in the produced batches of samples. It also increases the chances of producing unqualified batch samples.
Some of nowadays textile factories have started to use standard colorimeters for quality assessment, to solve the aforementioned problems of unreliability and irreproducibility in manual assessment. Currently, there are a variety of colorimeters with different advantages. For example, a portable colorimeter has advantages, such as handy, reading data directly, and connectable to a computer; a desktop colorimeter has advantages, such as stable performance, and suitable for partially-translucent objects; an online spectrophotometer has advantages, such as suitable for use during production in production workshops, which greatly improves production efficiency and quality.
However, the colorimeters currently used in the textile industry can only perform information extraction and quality assessment for pure colors (i.e. single colors). Quality of mixed-color fabrics cannot be assessed using the existing colorimeters. For example, an instruction manual of one existing colorimeter for color measurement clearly states that “a small piece of sample cloth delivered by a material control personnel should be visually assessed if it cannot be assessed by machine; if the sample cloth can be assessed by machine, assess it with the colorimeter followed by re-assessment visually”. In other words, it is difficult for the colorimeter to perform color assessment for mixed-color fabrics.
To solve the problem that color quality of mixed-color fabrics cannot be assessed by colorimeters, the present disclosure provides a new method for assessing the quality of mixed-color fabrics based on multispectral imaging of the mixed-color fabrics. The present disclosure also provides a computer-readable storage medium to implement the method. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the method will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the disclosure.